Post by CrouchingLemur in Dynamic vs static territories

Viewing post in Dynamic vs static territories

Maybe a system in which "settlements" are static, but "territories" are not?

There would be set locations for settlements (representing the "ideal" location for settlement in that area), but the territory they control can change. So when you colonize new land, you get a new territory with only 1 tile which holds the settlement.

Example/Comparison picture for uncolonised land: (grey dots represent settlement locations)

Example for newly colonised land:

As it builds up, the settlement starts exerting its influence over neighboring tiles and further. It could even control tiles, that under static territories would belong to another territory.

Tiles that would belong to another territory are behind gray line(could, or could not be shown during actual gameplay):

When it reaches next "settlement location", it creates new settlement under new territory(separated with thinner line):

Now, the agents system could come into play, because first settlement agent may want to keep all the territory it previously had for itself, while the new settlement agent will consider tiles that are closer to it (but were claimed by first settlement earlier) rightfully its own, and on top of claiming new tiles for itself, it will also try to "retake"(purchase, ask overlord for intervention) some of the tiles from the first settlement.

There could be laws for that so player can decide whether he wishes for territory borders to have the same distance to both settlements, use "static" territory borders as reference or use the "first come, first serve" rule.

As a sidenote, I also wanted to ask: will movement be tile- or territory-based?

Grigor504 years ago

Sounds like a good compromise, especially since most great cities, or even settlements, were built on certain strategic locations, that did not change much over time, other than with technological advancements and the discovery of certain resources, like minerals, or sometimes with great environmental changes. Paris and London were settlements long before they became great capitals. Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, is a fairly new city, less than 800 years old. Before it was founded as a proper settlement, "its province" was divided by the "provinces" of other settlements. The same is true with many other cities around the world, such as Warsaw in Poland, which was a insignificant town before the royal court was transferred there from Kraków, or Madrid, which shares a similar history.

The only question is how to do with those myriad cases where different settlements in the same region, "province", have switched places over the years, in terms of being the leading one. The history of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt have endless cases of this, as has many other regions that have been civilised for many years. Should it be possible to change the "capital" of a province?

In any case, I think we can all agree that it would be best with a system in which the simulation itself changes matters depending on endogenous variables, such as culture and economy. New trade routes, new technology, new influences, leading to an insignificant town to become the leader of the entire region.

itch.io

Viewing post in Dynamic vs static territories